Monthly Archives: October 2010

Masterlan 6

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I heard you like spare-time so we put some spare-time in your spare-time so you can relax while you relax. It doesn’t work that way.

Previous week I wrote about 101010, the hacker new-years party in The Hague. I traveled about 500 kilometers in a single day, which wasn’t enough. This weekend I traveled about 750 kilometers, in 3 days. If you also add trains, its 1000. This is what happened.

Friday 15 oct 2010

I’m not counting the train i took from Zutphen to Gouda just to have a one-hour meeting and 1 hour of mediawiki fun. Back to Zutphen and there I packed my stuff and went straight to Masterlan 6. This event in Horst-aan-de-Maas is a good lanparty with social people.

Together with JeePee (or GP?) we played Super Mario Bros 3 on the NES. Instead of taking the short-whistle-route we played through almost every level. We’ve seen all maps and now its even more clear why this game is so awesome. Even if you’ve played it for years and years there are still new things to discover and new enemies to defeat. I want to continue with the retro project.

With some guitar hero and some light-coding on my network scanner i called it a day. Oh wait; maybe some poker. 5 euro buy-in. Then all-in at the first round against people i don’t know. Never doing any-stakes poker again.

I expected to have a horrible night sleep in the noisy Merthal, but it turned out to be one of the better nights of sleep in the past few months. Exactly the right temperature and with earplugs there was no noise; i wished i could have slept there longer. But it was time for the next day.

Saturday 16 oct 2010

Saturday started with a 2-hour trip to The Hague, again to the revspace. This time to discuss things for HackSquare for CCC next year. We all talked about what we where doing and have a mindmap-brainstorm on next years theme. Oasis. We discussed all kinds of options including space, memes, holland and water; but it ended in Oasis. And thats what it is. Some of the Hx2 people already updated it check out our wiki (and with “our” i mean COMMUNISM). I’m excited for the things we can do for retro;

Ooh, and there might be a big surprise planned for next years CCC which is definitely vintage. Its one of those things that are SO awesome; its “Insanely Great”. At 6 it was time to get back to Horst. I arrived at about 8.30 and it was time to relax and just see what happened in the mean time.

After some guitar hero we played Anti-Monopoly. This game didn’t really do it for us. As a competitor we found we didn’t earn enough. 3 houses on the most expensive real-estate reels in 100 dollars?  Competitors had an even tougher time, one of them only made it past one full round. The rest of the game he was stuck in prison. With 6 players i cannot recommend this game; but well it was still fun to play it once. In other news; the language-usage-statistics peaked on the word “Henk”. An in-joke on the Mastermovie of Saving Private Henk.

Sunday 17 okt 2010

Then another great round of sleep. I slept from 3  till 12am and it was all good. Time to get up and go to Almere. A family trip. It was good.

And that’s it. 🙂 The second, (and last?), insanity weekend.

Conclusion

Its too much; doing one thing or something sequentially is better. I felt like i had to be at two places at the same time. This is not up to par with slacking. Another lesson learned. But i know someone who’d rather would be at two places at the same time. And i like his mustache.

    101010 – Hacker new years party

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    In the spirit of ‘live your life to the fullest’ i’m writing this page on the last two days of my life.

    Friday 08 – 10 – 10

    It all started friday, that day i rewrote part of my ftpscanner so it performs automatic network scans. One of the things was to automatically find the subnet mask. Another thing was to include DC++ scans; which requires recursive XML handing. Thank god for SimpleXML. Anyway; after about 12 hours of continuous programming i called it a day and went to sleep; thats where the madness starts.

    Saturday 09 – 10 – 10

    My planning for saturday looked like this: Get laptop @ aetab, visit the rest of the Retro crew and then move to the 10-10-10 hacker new years party @revspace.

    Home, Zutphen, 10 am

    Due to the coding rush from friday, i awoke at 10 am. I had to pack my dj-gear for the revspace party and of course stuff to stay over at revspace. At 12 am, i was off! First destination: Arnhem. Then to Leeuwarden, then to The Hague and then, as it appears, back home. So what happened, what did we do that’s worth mentioning? Well, it was Project Retro and Hacker new year party.

    Laptop, Arnhem, 12.45 pm

    My first stop was Arnhem. My own laptop is at the repair service; i use it to connect to my dj setup which i was bringing for the 101010 party. Because i didn’t pay much attention to the firewire port I ended up borrowing a macbook pro with Firewire 800, instead of the 400 i needed. I should have asked for it 🙂 These things happen.

    I’ll just have to improvise and have hopes on finding a firewire 400 machine. That proved to be quite a challange. But first things first; its 13:00 hours and time to go to Leeuwarden.

    Retro, Leeuwarden, 15.00

    now thats a tasty burger

    Now thats a tasty burger

    We’re preparing our actions for next years CCC in Finowfurt near Berlin. In this we’re supported by the HXX Foundation, we’re determined to deliver the best Retro Gaming Area ever. One of our plans is to double or tripple the size of everything we did before. In order to get there, we’ve to arrange a few things. One of these is to increase the stash of retro consoles. We plan to have these consoles publicly (aka free with an asterix) available to events such as lanparties, hacker conferences and the like. They also will be available at public places such as hackerspaces, makerspaces and such accross the country.

    Our first actions have been set and more information will follow when its ready. Yes, DNF style. One of the things you can expect is a lookback on what we provided in the past years, including pictures, reviews and such. The meeting ended with some delicous homemade hamburgers. And when a hamburger is good, I do make pictures of those things. After eating 3 I was stuffed and ready to move on. Thank Syb and Jacko. I left at 7 pm. Next up: The Hague.

    101010 Hacker New Year Party, 21.15

    Revspace front door

    The party already started. It was nice to see all the familar faces again. Guys and girls from all over Holland joined to celebrate the Hackers new year. (explained for NORPS: 101010 is binary for 42; which is the answer to the ultimate question in life.) And there I was, with my dj stuff and harddrive.

    Setting up the equipment was easy, but still difficult. Psychic already had setup running; laptop, stuff for volume (mids + eq + compressor), headphones, cables and two scratchpads. I brought additional stuff: turntables, a dj mixer, monitors, amp, cambles and headphones.

    professional HD enclosure

    professional HD enclosure

    Before i could start mixing, there was one vital thing to be arranged; a macbook with firewire 400. There was only one macbook with those specs, and I was not allowed to insert my own harddrive in it; it would void the warranty. So we had to come up with another solution. What about an external USB drive? Would it work?

    Well, lets find one. Will-Do let me borrow her laptop and her USB enclosure. Maybe we could mount the disk and run software from it. So we unscrewed it and it, well… sort of. One screw went dull thus there was no other solution then using a drill and drill it out. When we (Brainsmoke, Aequitas) got it open, it appeared to be a PATA enclosure. My disc is SATA 🙂 Attempt 3;

    Zarya took up the task to find something else. After much digging and searching through revspace, he came up with a potentially dangerious setup; a 3.5″ sata enclosure with separate power supply. Because of my history with SATA enclosures and wrong power supplies (*poof, disk dead*) we’d had to look for something else.

    Got Drill?

    And what would that be? Well of course! A bunch of wires! Foobar had something brand-new; so it had to work. It did. We placed the wires into a professional HD enclosure and hooked it up to the mac. Using the Boot settings we could even boot from the USB disk. We did. The system showed up working exactly as my mac used to. Running the machine from USB wasn’t neccisarily slower than my own macbook. Even running DJ software, iTunes and copying files went okey without any noticable performance drawbacks! Thats just freaking awesome! Hackers!

    Sunday 101010

    GMC had the Mic and we all counted down to 101010. Liftoff blasted through the speakers and Psychic started with So Long, and thanks for all the fish. Then the obligatory Rickroll and we (Zarya, Psychic and me) mixed together Happy hardcore, GOA, the Prodigy and closed with minimal techno. Good shit.

    The picture below shows the dj booth; well, it doesn’t really show anything. You might distinguish 4 speakers, 2 laptops, 4 turntables, 1 dj mixer, 100 meter of cables, some lights, a space-invader floor and six giant velociraptors lurking in the background.

    Most people left between 2 am to 2.30 am. That left some room open for filthy noise, 4chan music and incorrect jingles. But we also had to stop as it turned out sleeping in the space was not possible. After packing all stuff I left about 3 am. The trip home would take up another two hours and at 5am I was in bed.

    Here are some extra pictures from the revspace at the end of the night. Did you know they run (and are huge fans of) Windows 95? Thank god for that Microsoft Gold Partnership.

    Conclusion

    101010 has been totally fantastic and i can’t wait for 010111 (23), 100111 (39), 110111(55), 011011(27), 101011(43), 111011(59), 011111(31), 101111(47) and 111111(63). Thanks revspace for throwing this great party!

    Happy 42 everybody!

    Omnomnom cakes

    Omnomnom cakes

    MOAR?